As the year ends

What’s with the Promethean prose, he said. This got me thinking. I started with the certainty that if only there is a forum, the ideas and the meaning are inevitable. May be it was the osmosis fake, the “wisdom of the crowds” fade, indeed the heroic Promethean idea of the collective gravity take down, the unwise belief that the slaves at the bottom of a pyramid just really want to have coffee, figuratively speaking.

This concept got undone slowly. And then it resonated with ‘All that Music that rises to the Middle’. I realized that the middle is really stupid, not the exception but the rule, and always been that way. So this was the big change this year, perhaps it’s naive. Suddenly the fascinating problem was not why the dictators are holding the people down but how can you rule and control the unpredictable, irrational and mediocre herd. Dan Ariely pointed to the irregularities and Nassim Taleb cast the wingspan shadow of the foreseeable black swan. As the year ended John Nash outlined the game theory. What was apparent has been interpreted, humans are scheming, and to borrow from the cold war metaphors, only mutual annihilation can guarantee friendship.

Speaking of friendships, this was the year when the nominal friendships supplied the game theory with some real case studies, turning disappointment into betrayals. But the good news I am still drunk with curiosity. Not to sound like a geek but just today I figured I can download the 12 Byzantine Rulers podcast on my iPhone and it literally changed my understanding about the past 2,000 years of history in one day. If the past can turn so quickly, it is certainly true for the future. I raise a musical note to that – Time After Time.